Announcing Public Preview of Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge

This post was authored by @Arpita Duppala, PM on the Core Operating System and Intelligent Edge team. Follow her @arnuwish on Twitter.

Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge—where this is deployed as a module to IoT devices via Azure IoT Edge. It is useful for data that need to be processed real-time on the device or stored and accessed as a blob locally—which can be sent to the cloud later.

Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge uses the Azure Storage SDK to store data locally on a local blob store. This enables the application written to store and access data on public cloud Azure, to store and access data locally with a simple change of connection string in code.

Below is the list of supported container host operating system and architecture, available in Windows and Linux.

Container Host Operating System

Architecture

Raspbian Stretch

ARM32

Ubuntu Server 18.04

AMD64

Ubuntu Server 16.04

AMD64

Windows 10 IoT Core (October Update)

AMD64

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise (October Update)

AMD64

Windows Server 2019

AMD64

Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge – Version 0.5 (September 24, 2018)

In the diagram below, we have an edge device pre-installed with Azure IoT Edge runtime. It is running a custom module to process the data collected from the sensor and saving the data to the local blob store. Because it is Azure-consistent, the custom module can be developed using the Azure Storage SDK to make calls to the local blob storage.

This scenario is useful when there is a lot of data to process. For example, a farm has cameras (sensor) in which the images are processed or filtered at the edge by a custom module such that it captures notable events, like a cow running wild on a farm. It is efficient to do this processing locally because there is a lot of image data that is continuously being captured. Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge module allows you to store and access such data efficiently.

Current Functionality:

With the current public preview module, the users can:

Store data locally and access the local blob store using the Azure Storage SDK.

Reuse the same business logic of an app written to store/access data on Azure.